alt Hacker NewsWith all the naysayers on Gemini models I'm curious how many people actually use Gemini regularly?
For me, Gemini models are the most usable. Claude Opus and Mistral always try to turn queries into one-shot enormous commits, which just burns tokens, time and annoys me for something which is still wrong more often than not.
Gemini seems far better at listening to instructions and giving me what I actually want, on top of using far fewer tokens and wasting my time. Fable is the only model that's come close to Gemini Pro for me.
And as this is about Flash, it's exciting, I find Flash can usually get the right answer pretty quickly and without too much nonsense.
I use all of the major providers daily and I tend to go to Gemini for "fast lookups" where a good enough answer is probably OK. I use ChatGPT and Claude for anything where it matters and generally when I invoke all three -- Gemini is the most surface level with responses, and also sycophantic.
It gets worse from there. Gemini is terrible at agentic coding, primarily because Agy is terrible. I noticed Google updated Agy with this release, so perhaps that's finally going in a good direction. I'll have to test it. Thus far, my experience in countless experiments has been Gemini models being 2x faster yet with less depth in their solutions and a lot more going off track.
I very rarely have to stop Codex or Claude Code sessions because they're doing something random and unexpected (or not asked for). I genuinely think Gemini models are brilliant but virtually useless in agentic scenarios in my experience of the last few years (2.5, 3, 3.1, 3.5).
I should also note that Gemini web UI annoying resets to its lowest intelligence which feels scummy and Google is not transparent about what "extended thinking" really is. Past posts have pointed to "extended" being medium. Every other provider gives you the raw value (medium/high/etc).
So honestly, I feel Google would rather I don't use their models. They just want to get a little bit of mindshare and stay in the conversation. I had the Ultra plan and cancelled it once it was apparent they were not improving the agentic experience nor trying to compete.